Last weekend ARCA held its yearly conference in the beautiful town of Amelia, seat of its Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. With a record number of attendees from international organizations, law enforcement agencies, academics, cultural institutions, and private sector professionals in the art and antiquities fields – the conference, in its 8th year offered a unique meeting point for those interested in art related crimes.

Feint of Art

Judith Harris, Image Credit: Nour Abdel Ghafour

The first panel brought a number of new perspectives on fakes and forgeries. Mustafa Ergül, a librarian and archivist at SALT in Istanbul, Turkey, offered an overview of painting forgery in Turkish art scene since the 1990s, and the cultural, economic and legal aspects around it. Judith Harris, an American freelance journalist working in Italy, continued and initiated the audience into the con acts of of Christian Parisot, convicted in Italy as well as in France of fraudulent authentications of Modigliani works. Liliana Wuffli, from the University of Lausanne, pointed at the lack of resources aimed at fakes and forgeries and discussed her research project that seeks to build a tool to prevent fakes and forgeries from entering the market. Finally, Andrea Borroni, a professor at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, discussed the seemingly legal quagmire that comes from mistakes in attributions, like for example, this event which occurred this year when specialists at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum discovered that the painting, The Braunschweig Terrier, attributed for more than 250 years to a little known German painter, had actually been authored by Rembrandt.

The Gift of Our Fathers: Cultural Heritage Crime and its Regional and Transborder Consequences in Current and Former Conflict Zones

Maamoun Abdulkarim, Image Credit: Nour Abdel Ghafour

While the destruction and smuggling of cultural heritage from war zones usually only comes to us through the general media, this year’s conference included a unique panel with experts from Syria and Iraq and Bosnia & Herzogovina. Maamoun Abdulkarim, of the Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums (DGAM), provided his first-hand look at the fight against trafficking in antiquities in Syria. Samer Abdel Ghafour, founder of ArchaeologyIN, continued this discourse on looted Syrian antiquities with a further analysis of a specific case of trafficking in the country before the start of the present conflict and his organization's role in identifying the object and notifying the authorities as to its trafficking.

In this panel, some innovative new approaches were presented to counter illicit trafficking. Vijay Kumar, founder of the India Pride Project, explained how the project aims to bring India’s cultural treasures home by leveraging the power of social media – a grassroots movement that pushes for restitution with impressive results so far. Sam Hardy, Honorary Research Associate with the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, followed with a presentation on metal detecting and its impact on portable antiquities find sites. Finally, Jessica Kamphuis, graduate of ARCA’s 2015 program, drew an interesting comparison between the trafficking cultural heritage and endangered species from the perspective of border security.

The Thin Blue Line: Art Crimes from the Perspectives of Law Enforcement, Prosecutors and Private Investigators

Captain Rapicavoli from the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, Italy's Art and Antiquities Squad elaborated on the online market in illicit art and the way the Italian Art Squad deals with this new challenge. Next was Martin Finkelnberg, head of the Art and Antique Crime Unit, National Criminal Intelligence Division at the National Police of the Netherlands spoke on the one day law enforcement plenary, which stressed the the need for dedicated public prosecutors for art-related criminal investigations and prosecutions and emphasized that under present constraints, often the focus in law enforcement is on the recovery of stolen and plundered works of art, and after that on trying to catch and or convict the related perpetrators.

Finkelnberg also pointed out the complications of the enormous diversity of legislation in Europe in combatting art crimes. Lastly he reminded attendees that analytical estimates on how much money ISIS is making on plundered antiquities as a means of financing terrorism is based on very limited evidence and base assumptions, though there is evidence that ISIS does tax antiquities and excavating.

Saturdays session concluded with Steve Cook, co-founder of Tagsmart, explaining how advances in nano-technology, applied to artworks as an identifier, along with a unique code which links directly to the artwork’s online record has proven successful and effective in authenticating artworks and deterring art crime.

Art Proves a Refuge

In this panel Katharina Stoll, a Senior Consultant with Protiviti GmbH, explained how specific anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures, the process of a business identifying and verifying the identity of its clients as a preventative measure necessary to monitor for money laundering, could also be applied when vetting art market actors. She applied her experience in AML cases and practices to bridge the academic and art market dialogue on this topic. The author of this blogpost, an independent writer and consultant from Amsterdam, continued with a presentation on the MOSE Project in Venice, a multi-billion euro project, which has been plagued by corruption, that may not be able to protect Venice from flooding and could potentially be an art crime in the making.

Ownership History - Asset or Liability for the Art Market?

Through a selection of case studies of organisations participating at TEFAF Maastricht 2017, Gareth Fletcher, from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, presented a comparative analysis of provenance information provided for objects for sale and the relationships between its dissemination, complexity and the market performance of the objects. Yagna Yass-Alston, an independent researcher on the plunder and destruction of Jewish Collections in Poland during the WWII followed with the remarkable history of paintings from the collection of Leon Holzer, Kraków, lost in wartime between 1939 and 1945. Finally, Marc Masurovsky, acting director of the ERR project, spoke to the audience about one of the most unusual art thefts of World War II from the Führerbau - translated as "the Führer's building", Adolf Hitler's administrative building on Arcisstraße in Munich.

It was in the Führerbau that the Nazis amassed more than 700 confiscated or stolen paintings, mostly Old Masters, taken throughout Europe during World War II by the Sonderauftrag Linz, to fill the Third Reich's planned Führermuseum in Hitler's hometown of Linz, Austria. While the US 3rd Army met light to moderate resistance as it overran Munich, unknown individuals made off with
some 650 paintings on April 29, 1945, of which, 70 years later, only a few have been located.

Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Goods

Lucia Patrizio Gunning, a teaching fellow at the Department of History at the University College London, started this panel with a discussion of past perspectives on collecting in the Near East, examining the circumstances that allowed western museums and collectors to amass Assyrian, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, the motives that brought the nations, museums and individuals to the area, the means by which they were able to excavate and remove archaeological finds, and the outcomes of their activities on the personal and institutional level. Giovanna Carugno, Ph.D., Candidate at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, and tutor at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico IIelaborated on the evolution of EU legislation, beginning from the Treaty of Rome through the new Directive 2014/60/EU relating to the return of cultural objects unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State. Finally, Marco Seghesio, from the University of Milan, discussed the destruction of cultural property as a war crime, using the Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi case as example.

Whose Property? Whose Culture? The Role of Institutions

Jamie Perry from the US Department of Justice, outlined the investigatory, prosecutive and police work of the Human Rights Special Prosecutions Section. After that, Dorit Straus, of Art and Insurance Advisory Services, spoke about the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) of the US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) which was established by Section 306 of the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act to advise the president (or his designee) on appropriate U.S. action in response to requests from State Parties for assistance in protecting their cultural heritage, pursuant to Article 9 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention.

Aperna Tandon
Image Credit: Nour Abdel Ghafour

Lastly, the day was concluded with a presentation by Aparna Tandon, risk management and emergency recovery expert at ICCROM, who focused her talk on the organization's international capacity development programme on disaster risk management and its evacuation of heritage collections in case of emergencies.

Conference Venue,
Image Credit: Nour Abdel Ghafour

The conference weekend concluded Sunday afternoon and over the next few days attendees made their way homeward. Those already looking forward to next years conference can mark their calendars for the weekend of June 22-24, 2018.

We thank the organization for this unique gathering of experts from all over the world in the tranquil and inspiring environment of Amelia.

WARNING: this essay is a work of
satire.It will be best understood
if read in the voice of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, from Downton Abbey.

As
an ARCA alumna, I have come to warn you about all of the things that you will
hate about this small program on art crime. In that vein, I here offer you a
list of the woes of living in a small Umbrian town the likes of which will keep
you up at night as you scroll through old Facebook photos. A letter of warning, if you will, to all prospective ARCA-ites.
Should you choose to ignore my advice, I cannot be responsible for the
consequences.

Your
first few days in Amelia will leave you with an intense urge to explore and
make friends. The town is ancient,
surrounded on most sides by a Neolithic wall with even more history buried
beneath it. There are secret
passages and hidden rooms and you’re going to want to grab a new-found buddy
and sneak through every one of them.
DON’T. The more you
explore, the more you will love the town, and it will make it that much harder
to leave. Yes, there is a secret
Roman cellar underneath one of the restaurants.
Yes, the town’s people do scatter the roads with rose petals in the
shape of angels every June. Yes,
there quite possibly is a hidden room in your classmate's flat. All of these things are beside the
point. Walk steady on the path and
avoid all temptations to adventure.

As
for friends, stick with people that live near to you back in the real
world. I know Papa di Stefano is
fantastic, and yes, he will befriend you in a way that transcends language, but
do you really want to miss him when you’ve gone? And your fellow students? Well, most of them are going to
live nowhere near you. Do you
really need to have contacts in Lisbon and Melbourne and New York and Amsterdam? No, you don’t. It’s so damp in the Netherlands and we
all know London is just atrocious.
I mean really, all those people. Take my advice, ignore anyone that lives far away from you. You are here to learn and leave, not
make connections that will last you the rest of forever.

You
will also want to avoid the town’s locals.
Amelia is tiny, so getting to know most of its shopkeepers and inhabitants
will not be very hard, but you must resist the urge to do so. It’s true that Massimo will know your
coffee order before you get fully through his door, and the Count will open his
home with a smile to show you around his gorgeous palazzo, but these things are
not proper. Do not mistake their
overflowing kindness and warmth for anything other than good breeding. And when you find yourself sobbing at
the thought of saying goodbye to Monica, you can just blame your tears on the
pollen like the rest of us.

Your instructors are going to be just as big of a challenge. The professor’s are really too friendly. I know that Noah Charney says that he’s available for lunch and Dick Ellis will happily have a beer with you, but is getting to know your professor socially really appropriate? I mean, we’ve all attended seminars where you barely see the speaker outside of stolen moments during coffee breaks, and that’s the best way for things to go, isn’t it? Sterile classroom experience with little to no professorial interactions is the way academic things should run. I know I never saw any of my professor’s outside of class. And I certainly don’t keep up with Judge Tompkin’s travels through his hilarious emails; that would just be inappropriate.

And then there’s the conference. It lasts an entire weekend. Why would I want to attend a weekend long event where powerhouses in the field open up their brains for poor plebeians? I mean honestly, meeting Christos Tsirogiannis at the conference will be a high point in your year, and it will be too difficult to control your nerdy spasms when Toby Bull sits down next to you at dinner. And then, when you find out that Christos joined ARCA's teaching team in 2014 and you’ll find yourself scrambling to come up with a way to take the program a second time just so you can pick his brain. Think about how much work that will be. They aim to make this an easy experience where you rarely have to use powers of higher thinking. This should be like the grand tour, a comfortable time away from home so that you can tell others that you simply summered in Italy.

And the program would be so much better served in Rome. I mean, just think on it. You would never have to learn Italian because you’d be in a city full of tourists. You’d get to pay twice as much for an apartment a third of the size of the one you rent in Amelia, and you wouldn’t have to live near any of your class mates. A city the size of Rome is big enough that a half hour metro ride to each other’s places would be pretty much de rigueur. This means you wouldn’t have to deal with any of those impromptu dinner/study sessions at the pool house. And there certainly wouldn’t be random class-wide wine tastings at the Palazzo Venturelli. That’s just too much socializing anyway. It’s unseemly.

And finally, let’s talk about the classes. Do we really care about art crime? Sure, Dick Drent is pretty much the coolest human you’ll ever meet, and Dorit Straus somehow manages to make art insurance interesting, but really, do we care? Isn’t that better left to one’s financial advisor? And the secret porchetta truck that the interns will show you as you study the intricacies of art law, could surely be found on one’s own. Couldn’t it? I think we would all be much better served by just watching the terrible Monuments Men movie, fawning over George Clooney and Matt Damon, and thinking about the things we could be doing all from the safety and comfort of our own homes. I do so hate leaving home. The ARCA program involves work, and ten courses with ten different professors, and classmates that will quickly become family. It’s all so exhausting. I mean really, tell me, does this sound like the program for you?

ARCA Editorial Note: If you would like more information on ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program, please write to us at: education (at) artcrimeresearch.org We will put you on the list to receive application materials when the 2018 application period opens in Autumn 2017.

As with previous years, the objective of the conference was to share perspectives and approaches working to abate art crime and illicit cultural property trafficking internationally, while facilitating an atmosphere of communication and collaboration between professionals working in the sector in order to share new and emerging approaches. The conference takes place mid-way through ARCA’s ten-course Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection which in turn gives the Association's postgraduate students the opportunity to meet and speak with experts from all over the world while exchanging news, ideas and experiences.

The following report will provide a brief summary of the speakers’ messages in brief.

Photo Credit: Billie Fee

Alesia Koush, an art historian with Heritage Community Life Beyond Tourism® created by the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation®, which has been operating for over twenty years for intercultural dialogue and peaceful coexistence in the world, gave the opening address.

Koush's research focuses on the protection of cultural heritage and she serves on the foundation’s international board of experts. In the framework of these activities, she conceived and coordinated two editions of the international workshop “Value Education for Culture, Peace and Human Development” – a theme representing the result of her multi-annual research, which she continues to develop participating at international conferences and publishing articles.

In Kouch's presentation “Without culture, there is no peace” she stressed that more recognition and legal protections for our shared, inalienable human right to culture are necessary. She reminded the audience of the teachings of Russian artist, Professor Nicholas Roerich and philosopher Swami Vivekananda who both stressed the need for protection of cultural values, stressing cultural education as a a critical component of teaching society of the necessity of preserving universal human values.

Ivett Paulovics and Pierfrancesco C. Fasano, Milan-based Attorneys-at-Law from FASANO Avvocati, noted the initial shortcomings and subsequent changes in the EU legal framework for unlawfully removed cultural objects and the important changes brought about by EU Directive 2014/60, involving a shift in the burden of proof onto the possessor of the object.

Lastly, Silvia Beltrametti of the University of Chicago Law School presented her study on the impact of court convictions of antiquities dealers on pricing and provenance of ancient artifacts at auction. Her analyses concluded that international treaties and legal threats correlate to a greater market demand for items with clearer and demonstrable provenance. The relationship was clearly exemplified by spikes in the price of classical and Egyptian objects accompanied by better documentation of the collecting history corresponding with the timing of high-profile prosecutions, like that of Fredrick Schultz and Giacomo Medici.

The second morning panel consisted of European and Antipodean perspectives on art and heritage crime and the trafficking of culture within the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans, and Australia.

Elena Sciandra, a Ph.D. student in International Studies at the University of Trento School of International Studies with a M.Sc. in Criminal Justice Policy, shared her findings on illicit antiquities trafficking occurring in the Balkan region. Sciandra called for greater research dedicated to transit countries involved in trafficking activities.

Professors Kenneth Polk and Duncan Chappell examined and presented contemporary developments in the Antipodean art world. Dr. Polk is a retired Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne and continues to serve as a researcher on such topics as art theft, art fraud, and the illicit traffic in antiquities. He also has been recently appointed by the Australian Government to the National Cultural Heritage Committee. Dr. Chappell is a lawyer and criminologist, currently teaching as a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney, and as a Conjoint Professor in the School of Psychiatry at the University of NSW. He is also the Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council’s Center of Excellence in Policing and Security and ARCA's Art and Cultural Heritage Law professor for the Postgraduate Certificate Program. Together Polk and Chappell noted that typical trafficking portals in their region include Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore and both cited multiple cases and legal instruments, including the “Head of Man” sold by Subhash Kapoor and the Australian 1986 Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act’s Section 14 on Unlawful Imports.

Saturday's first afternoon panel highlighted the current state of endangered antiquities from Mesopotamia to South Arabia via the Levant. Chaired by ARCA 2015 Alumni, Samer ABDEL GHAFOUR, the founder of the ArchaeologyIN – Archaeology Information Network, the panel focused on best practices and the positive impact of community-focused development projects in the protection of cultural heritage in politically strained regions. Mr. Abdel Ghafour also introduced ARCA's three 2016 Minerva Scholarship students for this year's postgraduate program: Zuhoor Khalid Ali Al-Ansi, from Yemen, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, from Syria and Ameer Doshee Jasim from Iraq. All three students have been sponsored by individuals and organisations who want to promote the study of art crime among the professional community actively working within conflict zones. The Minerva scholarship is set aside to equip scholars with the knowledge and tools needed to build the capacity to address heritage crimes successfully when they return to their home institutions and to advance this training within their respective regions.

As a Research Fellow at the University of Pisa, Costanza Odierna shed light on the widespread destruction of archaeological heritage at risk in Yemen and the University of Pisa’s related projects in support of Yemeni museums, including the Damār Museum and Zngibar Museum. Odierna introduced the digital archive her team has created, known as the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI), to act as a resource for study and preservation.

Dr. Giorgio Buccellati is the Founding Director of the International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies - IIMAS and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati serves as the Director of Excavations at the ancient city of Urkesh and is a faculty member at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Together, the Buccellati's offered practical and cost-effective solutions which they have used to harness vital community-based social-cultural infrastructures as a means of preventing site damage and the looting of their archaeological site. Their long-term project in Syria, located just 60 kilometers (37 miles) from ISIS-controlled territory, has been successfully maintained and protected despite its at-risk proximity to conflict zones in a large part because local staff are instilled with an intense loyalty to the heritage of the region and to the scientists and scientific work being conducted at Tell Mozan over the last decades.

The Buccellati's efforts to harness the cooperation of local people, who now serve as guardians of the Tell Mozan site, are documented in a report titled "In the Eye of the Storm,"This report details how a plan to protect Urkesh from crumbling has inadvertantly served as a model for protecting the heritage site during and in spite of Syria's long-standing armed conflict.

The Buccellati's challenged the audience, asking: “How can we expect stakeholders to protect the sites if we do not?”

The afternoon’s second panel discussion focused on characterizing and anticipating the trafficking of culture in and from zones of conflict.

Dr. Samuel Andrew Hardy, a specialist researching the illicit antiquities trade and the destruction of community and cultural property for various organizations including UNESCO is an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Program in Sustainable Cultural Heritage at the American University of Rome. Hardy spoke on his work “The Importance of Being Diligent” and existing trends in present-day conflict antiquities looting.

The second day of the conference began with a morning panel focused on cases of art crime occurring in Italy, offering insight into the challenges of repatriation as well as how successful joint mediation efforts can be useful in developing collaborative relationships which facilitate repatriation.

Virginia Curry, retired FBI Special Agent and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, shed light on the long-standing history of unethical collecting methods among some collectors of ancient art. Curry told the story of Piermatteo d’Amelia’s “Annunciation”, originally from the altar of a Franciscan church located just outside the city of Amelia, not far from the Boccarini cloister where the conference was held. By examining letters between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berensonwhich highlight a long succession of business transactions between Berenson and Gardner in the purchasing of art works Ms. Curry highlighted that the Boston-based collector had more than passing knowledge in the illicit nature of the stolen “Annunciation” which ultimately ended up in her private collection.

Sunday's second group of morning panelists spoke about fakes, forgeries, and the illicit trafficking of rhino horns infiltrating the market.

James Ratcliffe, General Counsel and Director of Recoveries at The Art Loss Register, spoke about fakes and forgeries circulating in the market, as witnessed by his firm. The Art Loss Register is one of largest private database of lost and stolen art, antiques, and collectables. Their services include item registration, search and recovery services to collectors, the art trade, insurers, and worldwide law enforcement agencies. Some of the items Ratcliff covered were the corruption and manufacturing of false provenance, the use of provenance to legitimise forgeries and the difficulties that arise from the fact that so few people have any interest in revealing forgeries which results in the recycling of fakes and forgeries in the market.

Dr. Annette Hübschle-Finch, Senior Research Advisor at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime,shared her studies on the market and the grey zone of regulation for rhino horns. Hübschle-Finch underscored that South Africa continues to allow recreational hunting of rhino horns for hunters with permits, resulting in abuse as well as regulatory challenges. The last speaker was Allen Olson-Urtecho, an art adjuster, investigator, and principal at Fine Arts Adjusters LLC as well as a Ph.D. student at IDSVA. Olson-Urtecho introduced his team’s Fine Art Forensics Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and stressed the importance of disseminating knowledge to wider audiences to curb the proliferation of fakes and forgeries within the marketplace.

In the afternoon, perspectives of art crime were shared by public sector law enforcement officers as well as private investigators.

Michael Will, Manager of the Organized Crime Networks Group and Focal Point Furtum at EUROPOL, provided an overview of EUROPOL's and Europe's involvement in the fight against cultural goods trafficking. Gonzalo Giordano, General Secretariat and Sub-Directorate of the Drugs and Organized Crime in Works of Art unit at INTERPOL, discussed initiatives and methods at INTERPOL’s Works of Art unit utilised in the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural property.

The final conference panel dealt with cultural heritage risk management approaches to effectively balance the accessibility with the protection of collections.

Judit Kata Virág, Registrar at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, called for greater stewardship and cooperation between museum professionals and law enforcement agencies in the fight against art trafficking. Dick Drent, Associate Director of SoSecure, Toby Bull, Founder of TrackArt, and Ibrahim Bulut, Business Development Manager at Meyvaert Glass Engineering, reminded the audience that in the security profession there are two basic approaches used to deal with security vulnerabilities: reactive and proactive. Reactive approaches are those procedures that museums use once they discover that their facility has been compromised by an intruder or attack. Proactive approaches include all measures that are taken with the goal of preventing risks before they occur compromising security. Speaking candidly with the attendees the panalists underscored that security doesn’t begin with the detection of a compromised situation resulting in a theft or damage to an art work, but with an advanced plan to minimize risk that includes many factors customized to the needs of each individual facility. The speakers on the panel pushed for change from reactive measures and fostering mew approaches which take into consideration proactive measures within the security sector, facilitated by security intelligence coupled with smarter techniques and more security focused construction.

Peter Watson, author of numerous books including “The Medici Conspiracy” and “Sotheby’s the Inside Story”, leaned back in his chair in front of the audience and like an practiced storyteller, said that he would talk about “some unpublished and unpublishable” details about recent art crimes.

He asked the audience to question about how much they knew about the truth of art theft. “Museums lie about provenance and experts are not experts,” he said.

Watson spoke about the stories in his books, of how the priest with the Vatican’s mission trafficked in stolen paintings, pleaded for mercy on the court, and after the judge suspended his sentence, went on to trafficking in drugs.

John Drew, the forger, was once suspected of burning down a house that killed a Hungarian lodger and two months ago was sentenced for defrauding a widow.

When Robin Symes partner Kristos died, Symes went to jail. The judge changed the case from a civil to a criminal case. Symes was sentenced to two years in jail and only served 10 months. He made enemies with Kristo’s family. A month after Robin came out of jail, a BMW was deliberately set on fire and a yacht went up in flames. “Nothing was ever proved, but this is underlining the idea that we are not dealing with nice people,” Watson said.

In regards to the Sevso silver, a strange murder in the late 1970s in a wine cellar showed three sets of footprints going into the wine cellar, and two going away. People accused of these crimes are “too dangerous”, Watson said. His friend Charley Hill, who recovered one of the Munch paintings while working for Scotland Yard, said that his children were threatened in a case.

“This is a very unpleasant world so watch where you’re going,” Watson told the audience.